{"id":242433,"date":"2025-09-20T22:14:09","date_gmt":"2025-09-20T22:14:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/242433\/"},"modified":"2025-09-20T22:14:09","modified_gmt":"2025-09-20T22:14:09","slug":"lorde-strips-down-at-chicago-ultrasound-show-concert-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/242433\/","title":{"rendered":"Lorde Strips Down at Chicago ‘Ultrasound’ Show: Concert Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tIf Lorde<\/a> is seen by some as one of pop music\u2019s great mystics, she is also a master of decreation \u2014 or unmaking her persona and herself. Midway through her performance at the Chicago stop of her \u201cUltrasound\u201d world tour,<\/a> she paused the show and asked for the arena lights to be turned on so that she could get a look at the audience.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt\u2019s you who\u2019s made these songs live the way they do,\u201d she said, the bright lights acting as an equalizer of sorts: robbed of its shadow, her face was suddenly just like those in the audience. For that moment, Lorde was Ella Yelich-O\u2019Connor, or as close to her real-life self as her onstage presence would allow. \u201cIt\u2019s nothing to do with me, it\u2019s everything to do with you.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe crowd roared. It was one moment among many of deconstruction, reconstruction and transformation that characterize Lorde\u2019s work. The set covered all four albums in her oeuvre \u2014 she played \u201cRoyals,\u201d her 2013 breakthrough hit and seemingly a natural encore, second \u2014 but focused primarily on her latest, \u201cVirgin.\u201d<\/a> She conducted wardrobe changes in view of the audience, removing individual pieces of clothing during and in between songs. She pushed down her jeans to reveal black Calvin Klein underwear and took off her shoes for \u201cCurrent Affairs\u201d; before \u201cGRWM\u201d she hitched up her dark blue shirt and gyrated inches away from a camera, broadcasting her sweaty stomach to the arena on the screen behind her. For \u201cMan of the Year,\u201d arguably the show\u2019s climax, the singer applied silver tape to her chest, singing shirtless with jeans and a silver chain, embodying the vision she had had of herself and her gender identity while creating \u201cVirgin.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThese small-scale outfit changes, paired with an intricate and precise lighting design that, at times, bathed the arena in blue light, seemed to reveal Lorde\u2019s desire to bare everything, to be so transparent as to be see through. The cover of \u201cVirgin\u201d features an X-ray image of a pelvis with an IUD, a zipper and belt buckle; on the album, Lorde sings about troubled relationships and intimacy, struggles with body image and becoming \u201csomeone more like myself.\u201d All throughout \u201cVirgin\u201d (and, indeed, her previous albums) is a reaching for purity \u2014 of self, of place, of experience. But wrapped around that purity are layers \u2014 layers she spoke about during the show.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cYou want to taste the strange taste of life, you want sweet and sour, bitter,\u201d she said to the audience. \u201cYou understand that by peeling away the layers something very truthful and beautiful is there to be found.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe process of peeling those layers, though, can be disorienting, particularly in a world where attempting to map the nebulousness of self is often interrupted and fragmented by the screen. If \u201cVirgin\u201d is a distilled and compact work, then the concert visually complimented and enhanced it, splitting Lorde and her two grey-clad dancers into frenetic arrangements of image and video \u2014 both for entertainment value, certainly, but also as a kind of commentary on digital subjectivity. At one point, one of the dancers held a camera and microphone in front of Lorde, walking in front of her like a pseudo-paparazzo, the omnipresent sea of phone cameras below also capturing every move.<\/p>\n

\n\tLorde then broke the fourth wall for her penultimate song, \u201cDavid,\u201d a haunting meditation on a past relationship. Shrouded in a jacket seemingly made of light panels, she descended from the stage into the crowd, which split to make a path for her.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWhy do we run to the ones we do?\u201d she sang, reaching the opposite end of the arena as the song neared its roaring, pulsing finale. \u201cI don\u2019t belong to anyone.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tWith that, the lights turned off. Lorde re-emerged in a blue sweatshirt, still opposite the stage, a single light beam crossing the arena above her, to play \u201cRibs,\u201d from her first album, \u201cPure Heroine.\u201d As the song ended, she reached up to the beam and caught it with her hand. In the last few seconds her palm glowed red, and then the light disappeared.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If Lorde is seen by some as one of pop music\u2019s great mystics, she is also a master…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":242434,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[171,17076,975,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-242433","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-lorde","10":"tag-music","11":"tag-united-states","12":"tag-unitedstates","13":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115238932615870579","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242433","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=242433"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242433\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/242434"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=242433"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=242433"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=242433"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}